Of sex and science. Elizabeth Pisani's blog about HIV and other sundry things.

Archive for the tag "epidemiology"

Earlier this month, the head of HIV programming at WHO told a journalist that HIV was not going to storm through the heterosexual populations of any continent outside Africa. And he was right. But days later, he issued a hasty and non-sensical “correction”. The correction made it politically correct, but epidemiologically incorrect. I got in […]

In the prologue to my soon-to-be-published book The Wisdom of Whores, I give an example of the different ways nerds like me look at cause and effect in health. When I was writing it, I made up an example out of the air — something that I thought that people would relate to and be […]

Ted Gideonse doesn’t understand how Obama can be up two points in one poll and Hillary up 12 points in another. Because I’m in Bangkok and it’s past my bedtime, I’m going to be lazy and refer back to an earlier but ever more pertinent post: Voting is like sex.

Anyone else amused by all the harrumphing about the pollsters’ failure to predict the results of the New Hampshire Democratic party primary? All manner of explanations are offered for why the pollsters got things so wrong. But very few people have come up with the explanation that is levelled at virtually every piece of sexual […]

Writing in the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway ponders on whether there’s any reason that people who have good marriages should have good relationships in the office. (Let’s keep the marriage counsellors out of the office). She reasons that people behave are very differently at home and at work, with men often being pussies at home […]

In an eminently sensible commentary in this week’s Lancet (Drop of HIV estimate for India to less than half — access may require painless free registration), Lalit and Rakhi Dandona explain how India managed to overestimate the number of people living with HIV by over 100%, adding a cool 2.7 million notional HIV infections to […]

In his “Open letter to epidemiologists and surveillance experts” Tim France looks at falling HIV prevalence rates in Zimbabwe and asks an important question: is lower HIV prevalence always a good thing? He points out several situations where HIV prevalence could be expected to rise, for “good” reasons. Obviously, the longer people survive with HIV, […]

One in 30 adults in Washington DC is infected with HIV, and that’s just the people we know about. That puts the capital of the United States on a par with Congo, Ethiopia and Angola. Why these scandalously high rates, over 9 times the national average? The report (pdf file, 139 pages) from the Washington […]

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Wisdom of Whores is Elizabeth Pisani's blog and personal site. For her professional site please visit